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Three YK Commentaries

Three Yearly Kos comments that have caught my eye this afternoon. (Of the three, I think Rick Herzberg is the only one here.)

Ann Althouse ponders the attendance uptick from to 1,500 from lasy year’s 1,200. She’s “surprised there is such a small increase in participants since last year. You’d think the proximity of the election and the glitziness of the guests would have much more effect. [Update: Althouse later added this to her post:

[MORE: I’m told in email that a cap was imposed on the number of participants.]

Rick Hertzberg , from his brand new blog, on how his expectations met with reality: “I was expecting this crowd to look weirder. Not hippie weirder, though I did expect a bit of that, but nerdy weirder. So I was surprised at how extraordinarily normal everyone looked.” (By coincidence, Ezra Klein just gave Hertzberg a shout-out from the stage of the Blogs and Journalism: the new news? panel.)

Josh Marshall, who has been oft-cited but has been rarely sighted here, responded to the hot E.J. Dionne column comparing Kos and Limbaugh, blogs and radio. “The key to understanding all this, I think — and I’ll leave this to another post — is to get a proper handle on the interplay between the media technologies, the wave of organizational fervor that they are both helping to generate and also being sustained by, and the ideological shifts that seem to be sweeping over the body politic. Like then, I think you can hear the rumbling over the horizon.”